Hedonic adaptation: you should not seeks pleasure
Epistemic status: highly important knowledge, but approximately two-thirds of people on LessWrong already know it. However, I add some new ideas.
Today’s world is awesome, but some peoples are unhappy anywhere. Why did all the peoples of middle age did not suicided, if their life conditions was so suck in comparison with us?
If peoples like taking drugs so much, why are drug addict’s less happy than an average human?
Why don’t you like simple pleasures any more, if you enjoyed them when you was child (think about any computer game from your childhood)?
The answer to all those questionnes is hedonic adaptation: We adapt to our level of pleasure over time.
If you start to do something you like, you will feel yourself awesome first few days, but then your default level of pleasure will rise, and you will need to do those things you like just to feel yourself normal[1].
That means that it doesn’t matter how much pleasure you have in the long run. “What’s better — to have a long but boring life, or a short but vibrant one?” is a false dilemma. You have a long life with X happiness per year, or you have a short life with X happiness per year. You will have more happiness in total if you choose the long one.
There is even a neurological explanation for all this: when you do something that your reward system considers good, dopamine and serotonin are released. If there is too much of it, receptors lose sensitivity. If there is not enough, receptors increase sensitivity.
But it can’t be the whole story. Sometimes, peoples feels unhappy for months because of depression. Sometimes, peoples plan their suicide for months. Why don’t they just adapt?
There are things to which our state does not adapt. I prefer to call the sum of all effects of those things “happiness”.
Proofs that happiness exist and depend from different factors: [2][3]
Now it’s a good moment to explain how to be happy, because if something matter, it’s happiness. Here’s a good post explaining this: [4].
As water fall down and calculator adds numbers, humans do things that make pleasure to them in past, but don’t those that make happy (by default). so you should to put effort to choose things that make you happy.
Try to track it and avoid things that things that bring pleasure, but
Takes time, so you don’t spend it with friends/family (video games, series, films, enterteinment videos on youtube, musik...)
Takes money (smoking)
Are dengerous (motocycle riding)
Are bed for health (looking a serial instead of going to sleep)
I here the voice of reader here: “it’s easy to say “just don’t play video games”, but a lot of peoples try and falls here”.
Wait for a set of lifehacks for productivity- some of them are developed by me so they are unique- and that work, in next posts!
I think this attributes way too much to hedonic adaptation. It’s a real thing, and one’s felt-happiness-from-experiences does change over time. HOWEVER, there’s also a difference between pleasure and happiness, and for each of them different nonlinear impact over different timeframes.
These more fundamental differences in conflicting types and timeframes of desirable experiences can outweigh hedonic adaption by quite a bit. Reflectively, hedonic adaptation explains less than 1⁄4 of my experenced variance in desirability of different framings of experiences.
I’m interesting on your model, but I didn’t understand it, because this comment is too abstract. Can you give few example that proof your hypothesis, please?
Sure. I’ll take 2 of your 3 examples:
This really does not seem to be related to adaptation, but to multiple dimensions and timeframes of happiness. This is a distinction between pleasure and happiness.
I definitely still like simple pleasures, they’re just not enough for happiness anymore. In fact, they never were, but memory is a funny thing. This is also not caused by adaptation but is more about different context and complexity of experience to integrate the simple pleasure into.
I sometimes argue that even the common drive to variety is distinct from hedonic adaptation, but I’ll leave that for later.
Note that I don’t deny that hedonic adaptation is real and important—people’s short-term happiness change and (partial) reversion to previous levels when losing a limb or winning a lottery are pretty strong examples. I only claim that there are multiple other mechanisms that explain a lot of change over time in experience->happiness causality.
I wrote about distinction between pleasure and happiness later in the article.
My model is this: there are different experiences. Each one give some amount of long-term happiness and pleasure. But there’s no big correlation between these 2 things.
Although in short term, pleasure does bring happiness, so if you do something pleasant, you would be happy while you do it and unhappy when you not.
But there are many nuances here that I did not mention. For example, if you have strict schedule like home/work, your brain will create a default level of pleasure for each activity. This way, you would not suffer during all work hours and won’t feel overwhelming pleasure all the time at home.
I think drive to variety is all about happiness, not pleasure.
Do you disagree with my model, or do you think I should add those remarks to the post ?
I fully agree with the distinction between pleasure and happiness, though I suspect the relationship between them is more complicated than long vs short terms. You should probably retitle the post and remove hedonic adaptation as your primary cause for the distinction. Either explore other causes, or just describe the weakness of the correlation without naming the reason.
Can you explain with few exemples what do you mean by “more complicated”?